Here you get an overview of valuable – and FREE – books and reports related to open innovation, co-creation and crowdsourcing.

Drop a comment if you know of other books, reports or longer articles that are available for free and worth sharing.

BOOKS:

Social Media for Corporate Innovators and Entrepreneurs: Add Power to Your Innovation Efforts by Stefan Lindegaard

“How can my company use social media to bring out better innovation faster?” This is the key question that I explore in this book, which covers issues such as:

• What are the benefits of using social media for innovation efforts?
• What are the challenges and how can you overcome them?
• How can the different social media platforms help bring out better innovation faster?
• How can innovation leaders get a better understanding of social media and start maximizing the value of their virtual networks?

Practical, engaging and direct! This is the style of Making Open Innovation Work, which explores the open innovation intersection between big and small companies by covering the following topics:

• Why big companies need small companies as part of their open innovation ecosystems.
• The benefits of open innovation – and the challenges it poses for companies of different sizes.
• How to make open innovation work when the partners are of unequal size
• How to identify and develop the people who will drive open innovation within an organization.

Open Innovation and Public Policy in Europe by Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke

This report combines new research and analysis on open innovation with focused interviews of major participants in the European innovation system. The recommendations comprise an informal ‘charter’ for EU open innovation policy.

Open Innovation in SME’s by Wim Vanhaverbeke, Ine Vermeersch and Stijn De Zutter

This study found that open innovation can create new opportunities for all types of SME – from start-ups in high-tech markets to players in traditional markets – because they can change business models without having the required technologies in-house.

This report looks into how the role of intellectual property has fundamentally changed based on these four key points:

• firms are investing historically unprecedented amounts in the creation of intangible assets
• innovation-driven growth is no longer the prerogative of high-income countries alone
• the act of inventing new products or processes is increasingly international in nature and seen as more collaborative and open.
• knowledge markets are central within this more fluid innovation process.

Here you don’t get free reports, but you do get a very interesting overview of blog posts and reports by MITsloan on open innovation. Some of the excerpts are quite elaborate which is why I include this link.

The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies by McKinsey Institute

“While 72 percent of companies use social technologies in some way, very few are anywhere near to achieving the full potential benefit. In fact, the most powerful applications of social technologies in the global economy are largely untapped.

Companies will go on developing ways to reach consumers through social technologies and gathering insights for product development, marketing, and customer service. Yet the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises.”